13,000 Boxes of Girl Scout Cookies Destroyed

It would take a heart of stone to watch thousands of delicious Thin Mints and Caramel DeLites be crushed under a giant tractor and not say, "Hey! I would have eaten those."

CBS has a video of more than 13,000 perfectly good, unexpired boxes of Girl Scout cookies being crushed to pieces before being shipped off to a landfill.

"Goodbye, Girl Scout cookies!" an employee is heard to cheer.

The cookies were traced back to the San Gorgonio Council of the Girl Scouts in Redland, which said their supplier, ABC Bakery, allowed them to return one percent of purchased cookies to the bakery without paying for them. Chuck MacKinnon of the Girl Scout council said they'd simply ordered too many cookies and the crushed boxes were the one percent they sent back, but that they had had no knowledge about what would happen to the returned boxes.

The cookies were unsold, but not unwanted. Local food banks say they would have been thrilled to get the unsold cookies as a donation instead of watching them go to waste.

"We would have gladly accepted the cookies and they would probably disappear as fast as any product we have in here," said Bruce Rankin of the Westside Food Bank.

MacKinnon told CBS that the council would try to stop ordering more cookies than they could sell, but wanted to point out that the council often donates unsold cookies and donated more than 100,000 boxes last year.